I’m not seeing it, and I’m looking. Since the big LA teachers’ strike started yesterday, I assumed conservative commentators would jump all over it. After all, as I’ve argued here and here, teachers’ unions have long been the boogeyman of conservative thinking about schools and society. So why aren’t conservatives mad now?

Why aren’t more conservative madder?

I checked all the usual suspects. National Review offered only a bland review of the strike news. Even more extreme outlets such as The Blaze and WORLD Magazine just sort of regurgitated the facts. I didn’t see anything about the strike in The American Conservative, Flypaper, or any other of the conservative sites that tend to oppose the power of teachers’ unions.

I had to dig all the way down to Breitbart to find the usual anti-union rhetoric. While the other conservative news outlets are giving the story pretty short shrift, Breitbart is breathlessly warning that

the so-called “grassroots” movement fueling the strike is actually a radical organization spreading socialist “propaganda.”

…and THAT’S the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from conservative pundits about teachers’ unions. Why haven’t other conservatives jumped on the usual anti-union bandwagon? After all, as SAGLRROILYBYGTH are painfully aware, opposing the power of teachers’ unions has always been a hallmark of American educational conservatism.

Free-marketeers have always hated the stranglehold unions have held over market-based innovation. Anti-socialists have always decried teachers’ unions as bastions of left-wing subversion. Religious conservatives have always worried that union power forced kids to learn about evolution and sex.

So where’s all that outrage now? I’ve got a couple of guesses and I invite corrections.

First guess: It’s on its way. That is, conservatives simply haven’t gotten around yet to their usual anti-union complaints.

Second guess: The strikes last year convinced most people that teachers had a point. Walk-outs in Oklahoma and North Carolina and elsewhere weren’t led by formal unions and most people tend to agree that public schools really should have decent textbooks and classrooms.

Third guess: By and large, the strike wave of 2018 remained focused on bread-and-butter issues, in spite of lefties’ best efforts to impose broader ideological goals on the strike. Unless and until the strikes become broader lefty efforts, maybe conservatives will not find the strikes so offensive.

Fourth guess: Last year’s strikes were mostly in pretty red states. The teachers were not particularly left-wing. If this is true, it means that the new LA strike will take things in a new direction. In other words, I can picture conservative commentators blasting LA teachers in ways they wouldn’t have blasted OK ones. By this estimate, the LA strike will roil culture-war politics in ways last year’s strikes didn’t.

After all, as historians and journalists are pointing out, the LA teachers’ strike has a very different complexion than did last year’s strikes. Prof. Diana D’Amico noted that the urban/suburban racial divide lurks beneath every issue in LA. And Alia Wong argued that the racial makeup of LA’s strikers is notably different than that of Oklahoma’s teachers. Will that make a difference? I can’t see how it won’t. A bunch of Latinx teachers fighting for justice for non-white city students will probably ignite culture-war anger in ways that Oklahoma strikers never could.